Boing Boing » al qaeda

Twitter suspends account of Somali Islamist militants linked to Al-Qaeda

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 04:50:01 +0000

Two days after a group of Somali islamist militants vowed to execute Kenyan hostages, and tweeted a video of a captive pleading for the Kenyan government to help free them, the Al-Shabaab Twitter account @HSMPress was suspended. A Google cache is visible here. Warning: includes gruesome photos. The group took a French intelligence officer hostage, then apparently murdered him after an unsuccessful attempted raid by the French military which the US assisted). An @HSMPress press release about that killing is available on Twitlonger.

The Harakat Al-Shabaab Al Mujahideen Twitter account has been around since 2011, promoting the group's vision of strict sharia law in Somalia, 140 characters at a time. The US State Department was reportedly looking in to shutting it down ages ago. Wonder what took them so long?

For its part, Al Shabaab blames its "Christian enemies" for suspending its Twitter account. And they do sound rather miffed about being blocked on the popular social networking platform.

From Reuters:

"The enemies have shut down our Twitter account," al Shabaab's most senior media officer, who refused to be named, told Reuters. "They shut it down because our account overpowered all the Christians' mass media and they could not tolerate the grief and the failure of the Christians we always displayed (online)."

You know what's most surreal about their (now-suspended) account? Not the Christian infidel media stuff, or the terror-threat-y stuff, or the images of bloated corpses and prancing soldiers with Kalashnikovs. One expects all of that from an al Qaeda-linked Somalian terror organization.

No, what's weirdest are the tweets that sound like they were lifted from a j-school ethics debate.

How much of the gruesome details of war should be published without detracting from the accurancy and credibility of the event?

Why is it that questions and ethical concerns are usually raised only when the Mujahideen publish images of their enemy combatants?.

A photojournalist wins the Pulitzer Prize for a blood-spattered shot of an Afghan girl, but the fairly clean shot of the French is "graphic"

Noted.

The Zero Dark Thirty files

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:38:02 +0000

The National Security Archive, a nonprofit founded by journalists and scholars in 1985 "to check rising government secrecy," has published all of the available official government documents about the mission to kill the leader of al-Qaeda.

The poster for the blockbuster movie Zero Dark Thirty features black lines of redaction over the title, which unintentionally illustrate the most accurate take-away from the film - that most of the official record of the hunt for Osama bin Laden is still shrouded in secrecy, according to the National Security Archive's ZD30 briefing book, posted today at www.nsarchive.org. The U.S. government's recalcitrance over releasing information directly to the public about the twenty-first century's most important intelligence search and military raid, and its decision instead to grant the film's producers exclusive and unprecedented access to classified information about the operation, means that for the time being – for bad or good – Hollywood has become the public's "account of record" for Operation Neptune Spear.
As often happens when the government declines on secrecy grounds to provide an authoritative account of a controversial event, leaked, unauthorized and untrustworthy versions rush to fill the void. In this extraordinary case, a Hollywood motion picture, with apparent White House, CIA, and Pentagon blessing and despite its historical inaccuracies, is now the closest thing to the official story behind the pursuit of bin Laden.

Browse the documents here.

Death of a Prisoner: short documentary by Laura Poitras on Guantánamo detainee Adnan Latif

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 20:31:58 +0000

Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Laura Poitras, who is my colleague on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, has a powerful short-form documentary film out today, via the New York Times' "op doc" series.

"Death of a Prisoner: The Tragic Return Home of a Guantánamo Bay Detainee" follows a journey to Yemen, to return the body of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif to his family. In 2012, he "died in solitary confinement at Guantánamo at age 36, after nearly 11 years of imprisonment there, despite never having been charged with a crime."

Mr. Latif’s death is under investigation by the United States military, which claims he committed suicide from an overdose of prescription medication complicated by acute pneumonia. But that’s hard to take at face value. Why was he placed in solitary confinement when he was suffering from acute pneumonia? How could he have overdosed on medication, given the strict protocols at Guantánamo? Why did it take three months for the body to be returned to Yemen? And finally, why are his autopsy and toxicology report classified and being withheld from his family?
These questions are not just about Adnan Latif. They also address the injustices that our government has instituted and normalized in the war on terror.

Read the rest of Poitras' account here.

And the video is also here on YouTube.

Today, it should be noted, is the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo as a terror detainee facility. What irony that Poitras' film was published by the Times on the same day as this pathetic op-ed arguing Gitmo should remain open.

TOM THE DANCING BUG: Li'l Barack Has a Playdate

Ruben Bolling — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 17:00:29 +0000

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